blown blessedly off course

The Mayflower Pilgrims Find Their Place

In the age of exploration, no one anticipated that a mighty civilization would emerge in the lightly settled wilderness of North America. And of all the significant states of Europe, Britain looked least likely to plant such a civilization in the New World, or anywhere else. The English came late, and halfheartedly, to the competition in overseas colonization, trailing the Spanish and Portuguese by nearly a hundred years and lagging behind the French and the Dutch by more than a generation. Richard Hukluyt, an Anglican priest and Oxford-trained scholar who propagandized for settlement in the New World, commented in 1582: "I marvel not a little that since the first discovery of America (which is now full fourscore and ten years) after so great conquest by the Spaniards and Portingales there, that we of England could never have the grace to set fast footing in such fertile and temperate places as are left as yet unpossessed by them." Despite this tardy start, the struggling British settlements that finally took tenuous hold on the eastern edge of the continent ultimately managed to beat the odds, becoming the most successful colonies anywhere on Earth and giving rise in surprisingly short order to a potently powerful nation. This development has always inspired a heady combination of wonder, puzzlement, and profound suspicion, leaving both beneficiaries and frustrated rivals to ponder the basis and meaning of that unexpected ascent. In September 1893, for instance, a World Parliament of Religions gathered in Chicago as part of the great Columbian Exposition celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the New World. One of the participants in that assembly, a famous and popular Congregationalist pastor named Leonard Woolsey Bacon, was still musing over it three years later when he wrote his profoundly influential book A History of American Christianity. He pondered in particular the timing of Columbus and his voyages, entertaining the possibility that the Almighty deliberately concealed the existence of the New World, keeping it free of European settlements and influence, until new ideas and energy had purified the church: